anarchism, second job, visiting curtis, resting on thanksgiving day

3:27 PM 11/25/10

I am home from work because it's Thanksgiving, but I am not going anywhere to eat dinner. I'm invited to go with my aunts and cousins, and also Peter and Tammy invited me, but I'm going to just stay home and rest. Rest is what I want more than anything else. Trying to have fun on a holiday isn't usually much fun for me. Sometime in the future, it might be, but right now no.

The air is fresh and sweet outside today. I went out to get some bottled water out of my car and the sweetness of the air surprised me. It was cold and silent and full of rainfall. It often feels that way on holidays. I think maybe there aren't as many cars driving on holidays, and that's why the air is sweet.

I saw Curtis yesterday. I went looking for him, when I was finally able to get up and out of bed. I didn't see him in the store, so I bought a couple of small things and left. As I was walking towards the door, he came out of a small room nearby and looked right at me. So we walked outside together and sat on the bench where he had a cigarette. He said he was off work and waiting for his ride to pick him up.

I didn't have a panic attack, and I didn't start crying either. I was only a little nervous at first. I hope that I can get used to visiting him. It was something that I did on purpose, as a duty, an obligation.

I sat, like, three feet away from him on the bench, leaving him plenty of space. I didn't touch him at all. We talked for a few minutes about Christmas and some other things and then he finished his cigarette. I let him go back inside, and I said goodbye and went to my car.

I am glad I got to see him. And he mentioned again that I hadn't written much on facebook. It's true, I didn't bombard him with letters, because I was trying to take it easy after he and I had a couple days of big, long letters back and forth to each other, and I thought, he can't possibly like this, and I thought that I talk too much. But no, he wanted me to write to him again. I thought I had to give him a break for a couple of days, and I didn't want to push my luck. So after I got home I sent him another letter and I showed him two photos where he and his son Caden were in the same position and making the same face and they looked exactly alike. He even has Curtis's ears. They are the same shape and they stick out at exactly the same angle. I love his ears, so this is a good thing. He has both ears double pierced and I always stare at them when we're talking.

As of right now, it's my official duty to try to see him once every other week. If I could, I'd see him like three times a week or something, and I would be all over him hugging and kissing and snuggling, but instead I am going to give him a lot of space and try to act like an ordinary friend instead of the 'friend who adores you and wants to have sex with you even though you have a girlfriend and you guys are getting married sometime.' So I have to be an ordinary friend. I'm not even touching him yet, not even a little bit. I'm not sure when I will feel comfortable enough to do that. But like I said, I didn't cry or have a panic attack, so I am feeling a little more trusting and comfortable now.

In case you are a new reader who doesn't know what's going on, Curtis and I used to work together, but he lost his job, and I wanted to keep visiting him at his new job, and I was devastated that I couldn't see him at work anymore. So every time I went looking for him, I was crying and upset because I missed him and he was gone from my life. That's making a long story short. It took a while before I could actually FIND him at his new job, and I spent a few weeks sending letters to him begging him to tell me to quit stalking him, because I was scared that he didn't want to see me and that sooner or later he would have me arrested for stalking. But actually he wants to see me, or at least, he is able to tolerate it.

****
'They' think that the reason the Harry Potter and Hermione dance scene affected me so strongly was because I myself am in a position of being attracted to someone who is loyal to his real girlfriend. Every time I saw that scene in the movie, the voice whispered the word 'letdown' after it was over, and now they said 'letdown' after I walked away from Curtis without touching him. I checked the book when I was at Barnes & Noble. It wasn't in the book. It was added to the movie. The scene does resemble how he and I are together: we've been friends for a long time, I've always been attracted to him, and we've enjoyed being together, and we have had fun together, but he is loyal to his girlfriend and he probably would stop me if I tried to do anything that went beyond being friendly. I don't know. He always tolerated it when I touched him, but I was doing things like patting him on the back. And he wasn't always with his girlfriend during the time when we worked together, and he was more open to me when he wasn't dating anybody.

Anyway, I saw him, and I plan to see him again.

Another good thing: I am going to try again to get a second job. My bank account has been quickly draining down, which always happens when I have only one job. My rent is too high, and I need a roommate, but I can't have one unless I clean up the drug residue on the carpet, and I've already talked about that too much in my blog. I need to get that fixed. But I want to have a secure income first before I do anything else. I had tons of money when I was working at Weis and McDonald's, and then I quit Weis and I quickly used up the money I had. I'm ready to fill out job applications again, and so, yesterday, I picked up a couple when I was in town, when I went to visit Curtis.

I feel like everybody already knows this, but, I am an anarchist, and before I called myself an anarchist, I started out as a Libertarian and Objectivist, after reading the books of Ayn Rand. I decided to go all the way to 'anarchist' after I learned that the hackers are controlling the computers where they record the numbers of our votes. It isn't the electronic voting machines that we have to worry about, although there are some problems with those too. But they are a red herring, a distraction from the real problem. The real problem is that our votes get counted, and then the numbers get sent to an ordinary, insecure, internet-connected computer with a plain old Excel spreadsheet on it, and then, the hackers change the numbers in the cells on the spreadsheet. It's so easy to do, a script kiddie could do it. You don't even have to be an expert hacker. You don't have to do anything that requires a lot of knowledge or expertise. So our votes don't matter at all. It's all fake. So I am an anarchist, because our votes have no connection to the results of the election.

After the election of George Bush Jr., there was an article written called 'Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked.' Or it might have been called 'Evidence Mounts that the Vote Has Been Hacked.' It's on the internet. It's the only article that I ever saw that was written about this, but I knew it was the truth. I had been getting harassed by computer hackers since about the year 2000, so I already knew that they were everywhere. Reading that article was the last straw. I decided that voting was completely and totally hopeless. At first I had thought that voting was just difficult, but not impossible. I thought that there might be SOME hope of changing the government by voting. But now I don't think so anymore. The entire voting system is completely and totally corrupt and fake, and there is no connection at all between our votes and who gets elected - NONE.

Oh... why was I talking about anarchism? Because I was going to say, I hate the labor laws. I shouldn't have to get a second job if I want to work more than forty hours a week. But employers can't afford to pay overtime pay. If you work more than 40 hours, then they have to pay you 1.5 times your usual wage for every hour over 40. So if I work 50 hours, then 10 of those hours are overtime. If I usually made $5 an hour, then I would be making $7.50 an hour during those 10 hours of overtime. Instead of doing that, businesses always just hire extra people, and they make sure that nobody ever works more than 40 hours a week. The end.

So nobody can make enough money. There is an upper limit on how much money you are allowed to make in one week. If you are only allowed to work 40 hours, and you make $5 an hour, then $200 is the maximum amount of money that you are allowed to make in one week. This law is insanely stupid and it needs to be repealed. But the best we can hope for is that maybe, someday, the government will allow you to voluntarily opt out of the law - that you might be allowed to say to your employer, 'I don't want to get paid overtime pay. I want to work at my normal wage even if I'm working 50 hours a week.' Then, of course, all of the other ignorant people will get mad at you, because they believe they're ENTITLED to get overtime pay, and they believe it's bad and evil and wrong to NOT get paid overtime pay, and they'll be jealous of you and they'll say they wish they could do that too, but at the same time they don't think it's right. So you'll have conflicts with your co-workers if you have any co-workers who are brainwashed more than most people. (Usually, when I talk about this, some of the people kind of agree with me, but there's always some brainwashed person who insists that overtime pay is a good thing, and they're always mad at the employers when the employers refuse to let them work more than 40 hours a week and get overtime pay.)

The only way to get more than that 'upper limit' of money is to get a second job. It's pointless, inconvenient, harmful, and stupid. This law is the #1 most stupid and most obvious law that I would change immediately if I had the power to change a law. It would make so many people's lives easier if they could simply keep working extra hours at one job to go above the 'upper limit' that they can get if they work 40 hours.

They might think that it's easy to get a second job. But it's hard to schedule it. At least one of your jobs has to have flexible scheduling. McDonald's is well known for having flexible scheduling, and I read in a magazine that McDonald's was listed as one of the top ten best places to work, partly because of their flexible schedules, and I agree with that - I like this job for a lot of reasons, and I like it a lot more than other places I've worked, and I can work whatever hours I need to work, at whatever time I want. When you get two jobs, at least one of them needs to let you start work after your other job ends. And you have to be able to limit your availability at both jobs. You have to work in the morning at one, and the evening at the other. Or work overnight at one, and evening at the other. And so on. You can't have one of your jobs say, 'Your schedule has to be totally open, and you have to be available anytime we want you to come in.' If they say that to you, then you're screwed. It means you can't get a second job, because you are going to have unpredictable scheduling, and so you're stuck making that 'upper limit' amount of money for only 40 hours a week at your one job, unless they let you work overtime, which is unusual.

I HATE THIS LAW.

There are other laws that the libertarians and anarchists hate, but a lot of those laws affect other people, so we can't see them directly. But we have direct personal experience with the overtime pay law. I can see it and I can see how it directly affects my life. I can see how much easier and simpler my life would be without that law. This law is visible to millions of ordinary people, and LOTS of those people believe that the law is stupid and harmful.

There are lots of other laws I hate. I hate paying income taxes. I hate fiat money. I hate the banking system. I can't list all the laws I hate.

There are some laws that I disagree with, but it's not a big issue for me, although it is for some people. For instance, I don't think it should be illegal to go outside naked. You shouldn't get arrested for nudity. However, I really don't care that much about that law, most of the time. My quality of life isn't that badly affected by this. I can tolerate this law. But the income taxes, THEY have a big effect on my life. Because of the taxes, I have to work thousands and thousands of extra hours, to pay for *NOTHING*. Or pay for things I don't want, like, pay the soldiers to go kill people in other countries, which I don't want them to do. My money is used for that.

This is why I'm interested in intentional communities. I can't control the government at all because of the vote hackers. The only thing I can do is join with like-minded people to work together and build a new culture.

I don't usually talk about this subject (anarchism), because so many other authors have already written about it, and they've explained it so much better than I can. I'm just agreeing with them.

I called myself a 'minarchist' for a couple of years while I still believed in voting. It means that I believed in SMALL government, minimal, as little as possible. But now I am totally disconnected from the government, and I call myself an anarchist, and I only obey them so that I don't get thrown in jail. (I'm thinking of Curtis, who drove his car without a license, after he lost his license for drunk driving, and he got arrested again and lost his license again for another whole year. Originally it was nine months. So he will have gone 21 months without a license.)

Anyway... I'll just post this for now.

raw milk

I drank raw milk today.

1. I'm not dead yet.
2. The police haven't arrived.

But I did hear sirens going by a few minutes ago. Maybe they couldn't find my address and gave up. :)

This is the first time I've tried raw milk. Actually, it was frozen raw milk, because the goats don't produce much now in the wintertime. There was a little note taped to the fridge where I bought the milk, explaining that they were out of it, and frozen was all that was left. I'll try fresh-not-frozen whenever it becomes available again. (This makes me think of Antal Fekete writing about the 'good old days' of futures markets, where we expected seasonal variations in the prices of agricultural commodities. I can actually SEE this seasonal variation because the market is so small and low-tech. This isn't a factory farm operation. It's wintertime, so we don't have anything for sale. The milk is all gone. It's a reality check that reminds me of what it means to live in a climate with cold winters.)

I was pleased with the trust-based informal buying method where I got the milk. It's a place where you go only if you already know to look there. It's inside another place of business, because the original store shut down. I don't know why they shut down, but I'm guessing it was just another economic downturn kind of thing. It's a little refrigerator hidden in a dark, small, cluttered office area. If you didn't know what it was, and didn't look closely, you would mistakenly think it was just an employee break room. You just grab what you want and put money into a box, and write a note describing what you took. I also sent them an email first so that they would get to know me.

*****

So, what happened? I tried only a little sip at first, to make sure nothing bad would happen. All my life, I drank ordinary, store-bought, pasteurized milk, until my mid-twenties. I had a mysterious illness in 1999 that caused months of severe fatigue and digestive problems, and during that time, I became unable to eat certain foods and couldn't tolerate milk anymore. I had difficulty swallowing, and felt like I was going to throw up after eating, and had pain in the upper right quadrant of my abdomen. (That is the location of either the liver and gallbladder, or part of the large intestine. I thought I had hepatitis, but tests were negative.) I stopped drinking it permanently after that, because it just seemed too disgusting. So I was afraid that milk would be nauseating and undrinkable like it was during that time period.

The 1999 illness was my first experience of long-lasting unexplained illness, and my first experience of going to doctors and getting diagnostic tests only to find nothing wrong. (I watched a show called "Mystery Diagnosis" on cable at a friend's house last night. I'd like to talk about that show but I'll save it for some other time. You know I can't say anything in fifteen words or less. My reaction is: "They make it seem as though unsolvable illnesses are always obscure rare diseases - but actually, lots of hard-to-cure illnesses are very common and are caused by widespread problems in society." I have heard a million stories about people with ordinary, familiar illnesses who went to one doctor after another unable to get anybody to listen to them and unable to get any treatments that worked, even though their disease wasn't at all obscure. However, it's still important for doctors to recognize obscure diseases, and I don't have anything against that. I enjoyed the show and have a lot to say about it.)

My problem was probably from:

1. swimming in local non-chlorinated freshwater lakes, where I might have picked up a parasite or bacteria;

2. an unknown virus, since I heard stories of many people in the town getting sick at once with symptoms like my own - extremely severe fatigue that made us all think we had mononucleosis, and, in particular, a very specific type of fatigue that made your NECK in particular very tired, so that you could not hold your head up, and always wanted to lay your head down on your desk if you were working in front of a computer, as I was at the time. This "tired neck" and "wanting to lay your head down" was very specific and it was described by several people;

3. a bad reaction to the gypsy moth spray distributed every year by airplanes flying low over the trees (it seemed to happen right after that, and the gypsy moth spray is DESIGNED to interfere with the digestive system - but only the digestive systems of the moths, not humans; they say it contains a type of bacteria that only affects the moths, but I have my doubts - I've gotten sick every time they spray it);

4. food poisoning from a chinese restaurant, where my then-boyfriend's daughter threw up, and we all seemed to get sick for a while after that;

5. it might have even been bacterial contamination in PASTEURIZED milk, because during that time, I drank milk from a particular place - and I don't want to say their name - and even though the milk tasted good, I seemed to get sick a lot from drinking it, and strongly associated the sickness with milk.

The mystery is still unsolved. But I "got better" whenever I switched to the Feingold diet in winter 2000. I stopped drinking ALL milk. I stopped drinking coffee at that time, too. Quitting milk and coffee made my stomach able to tolerate food again. I became able to eat fats and greasy foods without getting sick. But now I drink coffee all the time, lots of it, and have few stomach problems. However, I am still sensitive to "bad quality fat" in restaurant foods, where a greasy hamburger might be sitting out exposed to the air, kept hot for a long time in a heated case, and the longer it's kept out, the more oxidized it becomes. There are changes when food is kept hot for a long time, or reheated over and over, and exposed to the air. I don't know the names of all the chemicals or how they change.

*****

Well, today with the raw milk, the first thing I noticed was allergic hives appearing on the side of my jawline, and above my lips. They appeared within about five minutes. That's the same place I get hives when I eat shrimp. They are merely a non-life-threatening nuisance. So, now I know, I'm mildly allergic to goat milk. It could be the particular plants the goats were eating in the pasture, or it could be the milk proteins themselves. I don't know. I decided I would drink the milk anyway.

After a while, I started wiggling my feet, because my legs get restless when I react to certain foods. This is something I learned about from the Feingold Diet (which is similar to the Urticaria Diet, a diet designed to eliminate the foods that trigger allergic hives). Milk makes some people hyperactive, restless, and uncomfortable.

So that's not too much of a surprise, but it's a little bit of a disappointment. Some raw milk advocates were hoping that maybe milk allergies were caused by the CHANGES in the protein that resulted from cooking it. But I reacted to the raw proteins (if it was the protein, and not the pasture plants).

Other fears about raw milk: that it could be contaminated with bacteria. I take this seriously. The bacteria come from the way the milk is handled and processed, not from the animal itself. A baby goat drinking goat milk from its mother would not get bacteria-contaminated milk. But a human might, if the milk has been in unclean containers or equipment sometime while being bottled.

There is a placebo-like hopefulness that maybe raw milk is a cure-all. I don't expect it to be a cure-all, but rather, I expect that maybe some things will get mildly better with dietary changes. Over time, if I make the right changes and observe which diets work best for me personally, then I will feel better. People vary with regard to which foods they tolerate, which foods make them sickest, and which foods they need the most.

If you talk to a random person about drinking unpasteurized milk, it triggers anxiety. They have always heard that pasteurization is necessary.

Raw milk is semi-illegal. (It's not as illegal as marijuana.) You need certain licenses to sell it and to make cheese from it. In order to get specific types of raw milk cheese, you have to go through some complicated loophole of buying the milk first and then contracting somebody else to make "your" milk into those types of cheese. (I read this on some papers that were there where I bought it.)

Some raw milk sellers have been harassed by government and by groups of people who don't understand the nuances of what causes it to be safe or unsafe. What I mean is that if you follow certain procedures, it will most likely be safe, and if you do things wrong, it will be dangerous... but instead, they want to forbid ALL raw milk entirely, instead of saying "It's safe if X, but unsafe if Y." They call it unconditionally dangerous, without understanding cause and effect.

My understanding is that milk becomes contaminated by the containers, pipes, bottles, and other equipment used to process it. If those things are clean, then raw milk is most likely safe. Raw milk AS SUCH is frowned upon, when instead, we should be frowning upon unclean milk-processing equipment.

You eat raw fruits and vegetables. Those can also be contaminated by containers and surfaces that they touch. They can be contaminated by manure or bad water in the fields where they're grown.

*****

Anyway, I am drinking small amounts at a time to see if it causes any problems (other than hyperactivity or hives). I will know what it is that's causing those problems and can easily stop drinking the milk.

I can also observe if it's giving me any benefits. I'm not sure what to expect. The cure-all claims are pretty extreme. There's something similar to the "cure-all" concept, and that's a "causes-all." (There must be a better word for that.) The lack of something, or some activity, CAUSES ALL modern illnesses or at least strongly contributes to them or makes us more susceptible to them. Raw milk, or, more generally, raw foods, are in the cures-all/causes-all categories. Supposedly all modern illnesses are made worse or caused by the lack of raw foods in the diet. This includes diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, among many other things. I get that impression from reading Weston Price articles - I agree with it, but also feel that there are other important causes to pay attention to.

I would add that the presence of certain chemicals, like pesticides, drugs, and heavy metals, are very significant causes of many health problems. Both of these are relevant to common modern diseases like obesity, deformities, mental health problems, severe tooth decay, and everything else (you name it).

*****

Genes

I was reading something today arguing against the belief that genes cause disease. I am noticing this idea and becoming aware of it. There is a pervasive belief in society that if you have any kind of long-term, hard-to-cure disease at all, it's the fault of your genes. You were born and destined to get this problem. Obesity in particular is viewed as something with genetic causes, and all of the focus is on looking at the genes to decide which people are most susceptible to obesity.

The "Genes Caused Your Long-Term Illness" belief makes people more helpless. Only high-tech, expensive, complicated, specialized drugs and procedures can fight back against those genetic causes.

In some ways I'm happy to read about highly technical scientific research and new drugs, new methods of treatment, and new knowledge. But the other side of me feels frustrated because so much troubleshooting can be done before you even reach the step of resorting to high-tech drugs and complicated treatments. Troubleshooting isn't emphasized enough. There are non-urgent, non-emergency problems where you DO have enough time - years and years - to try out different lifestyle changes and troubleshooting procedures. With long-term diseases, you aren't running to the emergency room about to DIE if you don't get some treatment right away. Sometimes in an emergency you accept a treatment you wouldn't have wanted, because your life is at stake. But not all problems are like that.

Anyway - though I don't necessarily agree with every single word of it - I liked reading this guy (http://www.youngerthanyourage.com/waisays/genetic.htm) arguing against the gene theory of illness. He said, if it's from our genes, then why were previous generations healthier than we are? Why did many problems appear only recently? If it's genetic, who did it come from? Why weren't our parents and grandparents sick with these same problems?

*****

I'll quit for now... this is a long ramble.

Danger of microbes and parasites; Generations; Progress; Metal sensitivity; Old books; Prayers and Voices and the Inner Self

This is just a lot of random thoughts. I just woke up from a nap and I am not very alert right now. I have been sick for the past couple days and haven't been able to eat very much, which explains why I'm obsessed with the subject of food (the Weston Price diet), and why I'm sitting here for hours writing in my blog instead of doing something active. I don't feel very well.

But this turned out to be an okay blog, not too negative or cynical or traumatic.

***

'Kids, don't try this at home': I haven't tried eating any raw foods other than vegetables and fruits. Parasites and microbes really do exist and they can sometimes be in raw meat. It sometimes happens because the factory where they're packaged is unsanitary, but other times, the animal itself already has something in it. So you have to find out which types of meat are the safest, and which parts, and you have to know what you're doing. I'm only reading about it but not actually trying it.

There are other problems that can happen from eating raw meat. I had a problem with sushi, and it turns out that I cannot eat raw eel. Raw eel blood is toxic, but the poison is neutralized by cooking it. Every time I ate sushi with eel in it, I would get very, very sleepy and tired, feel sick at my stomach and feel very cold, and then have severe leg muscle cramps for days. Muscle spasms were specifically what they described as being a result of eel blood toxin. (I seem to remember a couple of co-workers teasing me about my 'shocking' experience with the 'electric eel.' You know who you are. :) Maybe there's not much eel blood there, and some people can tolerate it, but I can't.

****

Generations: I was reading about generations. Having been born in 1974, I am part of Generation X, which is also called the Boomerang Generation and the MTV Generation (on Wikipedia). I had never heard of the Boomerang Generation, but when I read the description, I recognized myself and hung my head in shame. The Boomerang Generation is the group of people who left home, went to school, and then eventually boomeranged back to live at home with their parents again, due to unstable conditions in the job market - layoffs, the dotcom bubble, and now this credit market collapse. I never actually went home to live, but I've gone through repeated periods of unemployment, with financial help from my parents so I could pay my rent.

(In the old days, the job market was more stable. You might go to work at a factory, and you could expect to still be working at the same factory for the rest of your life.)

I agreed with that description, however I don't think it uniquely defines my generation in particular. I think that all the next generations will have that same problem, and that economic bubbles are going to happen every couple years. (I shouldn't say 'I THINK it will happen,' but rather, 'I'm as sure as it's possible to be about the future, and I'm betting on it.') It simply isn't possible to 'learn' from the 'mistakes' of the previous bubble in order to prevent the next one. The government-controlled fiat money system is so totally corrupt and unstable that it will collapse again and again for several more decades, destroying more of our economy each time, and I doubt that they will put gold and silver back into our money in order to stabilize it. Maybe a long time from now, but I don't know when. It's still politically incorrect to talk about gold and silver being used as everyday money.

I was laid off from a 'great' job when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000-2001. I used to sit at a chair in front of a computer, clicking links on a web page and printing things out, earning $10/hr (which was later raised to $12!). I STILL don't earn $10/hr yet at my current job, much less $12.

Then, I got another 'great' job, only to be laid off again a couple years later.

Ever since then I have read about economics and the money system in order to understand why economic bubbles happen, and to predict which types of jobs are more recession-proof than other jobs. Ludwig von Mises explained a lot of it, and so did the other well-known libertarian authors. And later, Antal Fekete explained a lot of it. He's sometimes hard to understand, but he knows how to interpret the significance of economic events that happen. He knows what it all means.

Our economy is becoming more of a 'service' economy, but this actually means something more like a 'subsistence' economy. It means burger-flipping. Let me try to explain this. If you are a primitive hunter-gatherer, you spend all day gathering food, hunting, maybe farming a bit, or tending your herds, and then cooking and eating whatever food you've collected. Then, you do the same thing the next day. Right now, that is exactly what I do, except I do it indoors, and I hunt and gather food out of a refrigerator or freezer, and prepare it so that other people can eat it, and then I take home money instead of food.

There is no feeling of 'progress.' Progress is when you feel sure that tomorrow will be better than today, because something has changed or accumulated. That could be wealth or knowledge or whatever. But people's attempts to make 'progress,' or to build wealth, or to start new business ventures, get destroyed by economic bubbles collapsing. Afterwards, they call that hopeful, optimistic excitement, that sense of progress and improvement, 'Irrational Exuberance.' But the collapsing bubbles are caused by the fiat money system, not by irrationality. (*Oops, what I mean is, yes, the fiat money system is also 'irrational.' But I mean, the problem ISN'T caused by individual people making individual mistakes because of their own irrationality. They didn't just screw up and invest their money in the wrong things because they were irrational all by themselves. The whole money system is messed up. But yes, the fiat money system could also be described as 'irrational.'*)

My pessimism and cynicism are a personal feeling, and I see it out in the world when I look out there. It's the opposite of rose-colored glasses. Optimism and a sense of long-lasting, stable progress: that's what I want to experience. Some people still feel optimistic and hopeful, and they still feel a sense of progress and accumulation. Some people still feel that the economy and their lives are stable and reliable. I've had a really lousy decade, so it's hard for me to feel that way. I think that if I cooperate with other people, we will all benefit and have more progress and stability. This is why I'm interested in community-building. It means: a 'grey market' agorist system, with more economic self-reliance, trading with people you know to get basics like food, without depending on large businesses that experience financial problems again and again.

*****

As much as I say that gold and silver need to be made into money again, I have a problem with them. I have observed that when I touch my silver coins, I feel a strange sensation in my hand. It feels like the muscles of my hand and arm are going to twitch or have an involuntary muscle contraction. Then, within a minute or two, my head gets a dopey sensation and I can no longer think clearly or express myself very well. Oddly enough, I think that this mind-state might even lead to poetry-writing - that's what happened the last time I experienced this. I just didn't make a finished product out of it and I didn't put it on my blog.

I have a couple theories. First, I think that some of the coins are full of lead instead of silver. If you mix copper and lead, you get a metal whose average density is like silver's. (From what I recall.) Fake silver. So I could be getting lead poisoning from handling some of my coins.

It doesn't always happen, just sometimes. It would be neat to do an experiment where I would be allowed to touch-test coins to see if I could detect which ones were counterfeit merely by touching them and sensing the lead poisoning through my skin. I've thought that I could try testing some of the lead weights used for fishing, to see if I got the same sensation.

But lead poisoning is only one interpretation. The other interpretation is that it could also be copper, or silver itself. I've decided from my own experiences and from what I've read that ALL metals are potentially not good for you, but some of them are much worse than others. Lead is one of the worst. Nickel causes skin irritation when it's used in jewelry or watchbands.

Copper is not really good for you, and I've had some unpleasant experiences with it. I tried holding pennies in my hand, and then pouring vinegar over them and mixing it around while holding it in my hand, and afterwards, I felt crazy and insane and I couldn't think clearly. It was a very bad feeling. The other problem I had was one day when my hair was wet, and I tried using bronze hair pins to put my hair up in a bun. (I usually use cheapo little plastic clips - I don't like them, but they're convenient and easy to use. They're such bad quality that I have to buy new ones every couple months because the plastic breaks.) The bronze pins touched my scalp, and it gave me a persistent, unpleasant tickling sensation that lingered for a very long time, and I was tired and could not think clearly. I remembered that familiar sensation from holding the vinegar-pennies.

(The reason I messed around to see what would happen if I put vinegar on pennies and held it in my hand, was because a while ago, I had a desire to make jewelry out of copper. I LOVE the beautiful bright color of copper, and would love to see it in jewelry, so I thought that I would make something unique that nobody else was making. But in doing my research I found out that pure copper tends to react with the skin oils and sweat, leaving green stains. So I became suspicious and decided it might not be safe, and I read about it, and found out that in ayurvedic medicine, they are very careful about using copper because it can cause convulsions and vomiting.)

Stainless steel seems to be okay for me. I don't feel any unpleasant sensations touching stainless steel 'silverware' or stainless steel food preparation surfaces.

I don't wear jewelry anymore because it gives me an unpleasant sensation on my skin, even if it's gold - though gold jewelry always contains some other metal like copper. I first found out about this when my watch buckle (which contained nickel) left an irritated rash on the inside of my wrist, and I had to wrap the buckle with string to keep it away from my skin.

These are all things where it's not a problem if you only touch a little bit of it. But if you handle large amounts of metal, every day, and if they are the most dangerous ones, like lead or copper, then enough of it will go through your skin that you will develop mental health problems as a result of metal poisoning. People who work at metal refineries will have health problems unless they protect their skin and protect their lungs from inhaling metal.

I can tell when it happens, immediately while it's happening. I feel that something is very wrong and that I can't think clearly. Perhaps that's a lucky thing.

I read on Wikipedia (I think?) that in the Roman Empire, they made water pipes entirely out of lead! Not just a little bit of lead solder here and there, but the entire pipe! I imagine that in and of itself could probably have caused the empire to collapse - and I'm only half-joking. That 'fact' could be wrong, though, and I never read it anyplace else except on one particular day when I was randomly reading things. I would have to look it up again and would probably find out that it was not true.

Anyway, I found out that copper is less of a problem when it's alloyed with some other metal, like zinc or tin. So people can tolerate brass jewelry (copper-zinc) a little better. I forget the details, and I might not be describing it correctly. But reading all about that led me to decide that copper jewelry was a bad idea. That sucks because I really do love the bright color of copper and I thought it would make great jewelry.

It's not as bad if my skin is dry. If my skin or the copper is wet, I get the unpleasant feeling very quickly.

I thought that heavy metal poisoning could explain why Enoch went crazy and eventually got sick, in Garet Garrett's 'The Cinder Buggy.' The Ludwig von Mises website was advertising Garet Garrett a while ago and I downloaded all the pdf files from them. They sell the books on one page, but someplace else, they offer the pdf files for free, if you can find that page. It's in some section called 'online literature' or something similar to that - I'd have to go looking again to find it. I loved Garet Garrett's books. I love the way he writes and the way he sees people.

******

That fits in with a theory I haven't talked about much yet: 'Books written a long time ago are very different from books written today.' You can discover this looking through Google Books or on Project Gutenberg. The entire thinking style is much clearer, less 'ADHD' than today's authors. A lot of it is much higher quality. Some of that poor quality of today's writing is explained by the fact that it's cheap and easy for anybody to get published, so EVERYBODY is writing a book, whereas back then, you had to be really great in order for somebody to publish you. But I also think people were psychologically different back then.

I was looking back at them to find out about people's psychic experiences back then - what did they dream about at night, did they hear voices in their heads back then, how did 'mental illness' look back then, how did they describe 'psychic' or 'visionary' phenomena, what happened when they quietly meditated or said prayers - when they prayed, did they hear a literal voice of God talking back to them the way people do today?

The answer is no: The Voice of God was a metaphorical voice, not a literal one. God did not speak directly to people in words the way 'He' does today. You can read about it all over the internet, if you read about paranormal/religious stories that people are telling, where they say a prayer, and God tells them very specifically to do things, in words. Nowadays, many people literally hear voices when they pray to God. I am sure that back in the old days, they didn't. But this gets complicated if you read the Bible and see places where God himself directly tells people things, though, and I want to sort that out and interpret what's going on.

I call myself an atheist. But I wouldn't have much of a conflict with religious people, if only their God was a silent presence that did not speak to them and give them verbal commands. It bothers me that nowadays, God speaks verbally and tells people to do stuff, to do specific things. The metaphorical 'Voice of God' is okay with me, if it's only a feeling or a sense that you should do something - if you meditate quietly and feel sure that some course of action is the right thing for you. But I've found there are some problems with that, too, and I'm not sure if I even trust those types of feelings nowadays. There are so many things that I would like to test within a shielded environment to block out electromagnetic interference.

People need to be able to listen only to themselves, to their own minds, to find the metaphorical Voice of God within themselves, without intrusions and interference from human activities. Humanists or atheists might call it the Voice of the Inner Self, which is how I interpret it. And I hope to experience that silence again someday before I die. Silence is a most precious experience.

thoughts about the economy

I was thinking about the economic collapse, this morning, but I know there won't be enough time to write about it. It's complicated. So this will be just a jumble of thoughts that might not be very coherent.

Paul Volcker is back. If anybody doesn't know who Paul Volcker is, he's the guy who used to work for the government back in the eighties - I forget whether it was the Treasury or the Federal Reserve or who it was. But he's the one who was responsible for raising interest rates to stop the inflation of the seventies. Well, he has now literally been re-hired and put back on the job. I thought it was a joke when I read the article, but it's the truth, Paul Volcker really is back.

On North Atherton Street my ex-boyfriend used to have a trailer. There were several trailer parks there, and one by one, they've been bulldozed. They had cheap rent for like $200 a month, and it was the best thing you could find anywhere.

Where his trailer used to be, there are now 'Habitat For Humanity' houses - at least, somebody recently told me that's who built those houses. And, they told me, the rent is now like $1000 a month there. I didn't verify those facts.

The people who originally owned that land decided to sell it because of the real estate bubble. The land became really expensive and they became millionaires by selling it, if I understand correctly.

So nobody can afford to live in this area as well as they used to. In order to be profitable, the rent is really high on that piece of land.

But now, land prices and house prices are supposedly collapsing. (Is it just house prices, or land as well?) This is the part that I don't really know how to explain. I understood it briefly while I was driving my car this morning on the way to the gas station.

We still need cheap houses (like trailers) really badly. That was what I had been expecting to buy, realistically - I thought sooner or later I would probably buy a trailer. So you'd think that since people still NEED lots of houses really badly, then you could build lots of houses and make them really expensive and make the rent really high, because people need them so badly. But that's not happening. Nobody in real life can afford those houses or that rent. They borrow money and they get a mortgage and they go bankrupt, and meanwhile, their factories are shut down and they lose their jobs. And the government puts ethanol in our gasoline and it ruins our engines, so we're spending all our money on car repairs. (Yes, I assume that was caused by genuine stupidity and not malicious intent. But now that I've heard about ethanol damaging engines, I get angry every time I fill up my gas tank, and I feel dread for the day when my reliable Honda starts having one miscellaneous problem after another, and I can't do anything about it. It was particularly damaging to small engines like lawnmowers, weedeaters, etc, and not as severe in things like car engines - but still.)

People haven't adjusted to this new situation. They haven't accepted that they are now taking a huge loss on the land that they bought at a high price. They can't build houses or businesses on it and they can't profit from it and they can't sell it.

What I'm trying to say is that we will soon have a situation where lots of people desperately need houses, and there are lots of really expensive houses sitting around empty, but there aren't ANY small, cheap, simple, realistic houses that people actually WANT and can afford, that are minimal and basic instead of huge mansions. Or rather, we already have that situation - I shouldn't say 'we will soon.'

When the homeless people try to squat in the abandoned mansions, the police will come in and throw them out. And these are going to be middle-class homeless people who saw themselves as 'respectable' just a couple years ago. Meanwhile, I read that even businesses are having trouble meeting their mortgage payments, and the article said that even things like hotels were going bankrupt and shutting down. But in places like Detroit, they have been using the hotels as temporary housing for people who were evicted because they couldn't pay their mortgages. So the hotels will be shut down too?

I read an article saying it wasn't just the McMansion owners that were having trouble paying their mortgages. New businesses are having that problem too. I've seen them all over the place. There are these recently-built retail stores, which appeared only in the past couple of years. It's expensive clothing and things like that. And they are putting those little strip malls everywhere. Those places are now having the same problem with mortgages. They can't afford the changes in the future payments - the payments will suddenly become much higher, just like the adjustable rate mortgages and their sudden increases in interest payments.

There will be these empty buildings at the little strip malls, but the zoning laws say 'You are not allowed to let people live in these buildings.' They are REQUIRED to be run as a business according to certain rules. There's all that space, all that shelter, where people could live, and it could be cheap, and it would be better than nothing. And it would be conveniently close, within walking distance, of other places like grocery stores and fast food. But zoning laws make it so that there is no such thing as 'walking distance' in some areas. You're not allowed to just let people live right next door to a business - in some places. It's not that bad everywhere, but it does affect where things are located and it does make it more difficult to just walk wherever you want to go. It might not really be like that here in State College, but I think it's more like that in some parts of big cities, where everything is required to be a skyscraper-type building. I don't know enough about this topic.

There is this situation where huge numbers of people need things really badly, but can't afford them, and there's this surplus of really expensive stuff sitting there that can't be sold because when it was built it cost a lot. It's not just houses, it's going to be other things, like cars, and land, and factories, and businesses, and everything.

I don't know how bad it's going to be. The collapse is dragging out, longer and longer, and we see one thing after another falling, but still, as you walk down the street, it looks like normal life. (The world isn't black and white - everything is still in color - that's why it doesn't LOOK like the old photos of the Great Depression. :) It seems to take a long time for the economy to collapse. You don't notice it happening all of a sudden. You might not recognize it if it were happening. Mainstream media news is still writing things like 'on the brink of a recession.' We're always 'on the brink' of something, but not there yet. I see phrases like that everywhere - it's almost a recession, on the brink of one, we're expecting one in the future, etc.

Oddly enough, I'm not joking when I say that I plan on learning how to eat worms and whatever insects are edible. I was thinking about agriculture, and hunting, and how it's relatively easy to grow a garden but it's difficult to own livestock, because you need lots of land and you need the government's permission to have farm animals. Zoning laws won't let most of us do that. So meat will disappear from people's diets as it becomes too expensive. This is already happening. I was reading an article about the price of food going up and how people are adjusting their food budgets, and meat is the first thing to go. Yet meat is one of the most essential and healthiest things that we need the most, especially the saturated fats.

You feel foolish whenever you call a false alarm. Isn't it ridiculous to learn how to forage for food?

If you get pregnant on a low-budget diet with hardly any meats, and nothing but ramen noodles or whatever it is that people are eating nowadays, then your children will tend to have more health problems. You have to eat really healthy foods while you're pregnant and nursing. (I never had anything against Ramen Noodles, except that for a year or two, it was all I had available while I still lived with my parents - that, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and Campbell's soup. So I dislike all of those things because I got sick of eating nothing but that.) (I personally am not worried as much about whether I can get healthy foods, but whether I can get all my belongings decontaminated so that my developing children aren't getting a constant dose of poison all day long. Growing medicinal herbs was my attempt to get out of wage slavery and it went very badly wrong.)

Anyway, as people watch this housing bubble and economic collapse, sooner or later somebody is going to say 'Everything would be okay if we just ignored the laws.' It's only 'the law' that made those mortgages too expensive. It's 'only the law' that evicted people from their homes when they couldn't pay anymore. It's only some imaginary paperwork that made it so businesses had to shut down because they were no longer profitable, and they went bankrupt, and they couldn't afford the mortgage payments. People are going to start saying that if only the imaginary paperwork would stop being so harsh, we wouldn't have this problem and it would all go away.

So the next step will be that we start trying to ignore things like foreclosures and mortgages and how much things cost and how much they used to cost and whether we're profitable or not. And it seems like that would be a wonderful solution to this problem. But that's where it starts getting really scary. Because something called 'Reality' is underneath all of that imaginary paperwork, and we're going to start finding out which commodities REALLY ARE scarce and hard-to-find in REALITY, after we start ignoring all the silly paperwork and stop enforcing all those silly contracts.

I'm not saying that we SHOULD continue enforcing the foreclosures. In some cities they've decided that they will stop enforcing them, and they're no longer evicting people from their homes when they go bankrupt. I feel okay about that. Something needs to be done, and I don't have a solution. I haven't thought about it, and my solutions wouldn't be used anyway, since I'm not in control of that situation.

But I have a feeling that's not the end of it. That's not the only 'harsh paperwork' that will be ignored and not enforced. More and more things will be treated as though you can wave a magic wand and make it all go away if only you ignore contracts, and ignore bookkeeping, and ignore those numbers written on the paper, and ignore who owns what. On the surface, more and more things will seem silly and artificial - if only the paperwork was gone, we wouldn't have all these problems.

Some of it is true - a lot of the paperwork represents 'imaginary' and 'artificial' things, like derivatives and all those other strange abstract financial things that nobody understands. But sooner or later, reality COSTS something. This economic collapse is really a few quadrillion pieces of paper being crumpled up and thrown in the trash. Everyone's still trying to adjust their numbers to find out how much reality really costs.

I can't predict who gets hit the worst or which locations will be the best places to live in.

I wish I could explain it better, but I still don't understand it. It's still very vague to me. I wish I could understand Antal Fekete, because he seems like he knows what he's talking about, but whenever he explains things, he skips a step, and jumps from one idea to another, and sometimes he seems to be saying the exact opposite of what I thought he meant, and it's confusing. He really seems to know something. He talks about the destruction of capital, for instance, and how this is caused by decades of falling interest rates. It seems like it means something, but I can't get it and I can't explain it to anybody else. It's frustrating.

I just want to know how bad the future is going to be, that's all. Is it going to be so bad, that even the burger-flipping jobs will be shut down? It's hard to imagine the burger-flipping jobs collapsing, but I want to ask about that possibility anyhow. It just seems like there are going to be lots and lots of unemployed people all trying to flip burgers at the same time. That's why I anxiously wonder about things like what kinds of foods you can eat if it becomes necessary to forage for survival. I really, sincerely don't know how bad this economic collapse is going to be.

I have to just post this since it's time to go to work.